A Sound Decision

You know, sometimes I think sharing anything about the Spotify model with someone new to Agile or Scrum can cause more harm than good.

A friend of mine forwarded an article to me last week and asked my opinion about what was being shared. The article was written by a Spotify product manager who experimented with taking an Agile team and removing the agile practices that they had been utilizing to see what would happen. That’s right, they quit facilitating all of the events that are outlined in the Scrum framework.

Those results validate something that I have felt should occur with a Scrum team. Over time, by following the framework, the members of a Scrum team will become better at collaboration, planning, and delivery of value. My theory is that, as they become better communicators and collaborators, the team’s reliance on the Scrum framework will change as long as they continue to live by the values of Scrum.

Dealing With A Lack of Context

This result might sound appealing to many. Some of the statements I have heard include:

“Trust the team and they will figure it out.”

“We don’t know stinking Scrum.”

“We should just move to the Spotify model of software development.”

My concern is one of Context. Maybe it is better stated as Lack of Context. What’s missing is the context of where the team was at the time the changes were introduced.

Spotify was founded in April 2006 and had adopted Scrum early in their journey. Yet, they had encountered some scaling problems as the number of teams grew. They brought in Henrik Kniberg, who helped Spotify embrace the Agile mindset by taking their experiences with Scrum and adding in practices from other Agile practices and frameworks to develop what has become known as the Spotify model. Essentially, Spotify moved past Scrum to achieve a higher level of Agile. Even today, the Spotify model is not even fully used within Spotify.

I like the Spotify model. Many concepts (tribes, guilds, squads, etc.) are appealing. What get’s lost in translation, though, is that Agile is a mindset. Not just a practice or a tool, but a different way of thinking and working. Without embracing the Agile mindset, the Spotify model and its associated practices will do no better than any other practice including Waterfall or Scrum. The Spotify model is one of several ways to scale agility across an organization.

Last Friday, I got the opportunity to instruct at Eleven Fifty Academy. I have been working with Eleven Fifty for three years, and always get re-energized when I actually teach a class, and this class was no exception. Many of the students come from industries other than IT or software development.

I believe the curriculum we are using works exceptionally well. It’s a one-day program that we designed for individuals whom can’t afford the price of the traditional two day Scrum class, or can’t make the time commitment. The course is broken down into two phases.

The first phase consists of pre-work for the students to get an intro to the basic concepts on their own time and at their own pace. Eleven Fifty requires students to complete the pre-work before they start the program. It’s a series of videos, blog posts, and articles that provide overviews for Scrum basics:

Intro to Agile

Intro to Scrum

Roles

Scrum Master

Product Owner

Development Team

Elements of Scrum

Sprint Planning

Sprint Review

Daily Scrum

Sprint Retrospective

Quizzes to reinforce the learning from each module.

The second phase is a one-day, in-class workshop that usually occurs within the first two weeks of each student’s time at Eleven Fifty. Our focus is to review and reinforce the knowledge the student acquired in the pre-work.

The pre-work encourages the student to consider Scrum, and it’s components, over a series of time. The underlying principle is that the more times students dissect the content, the more likely it is to be retained in their long-term memory. Some highlights:

The Ball Point Game

Review the Concepts

Roles

Events

Artifacts

Activities

Myth or Fact – Scrum Events

Pick and Place – Time permitting

Characteristics of Roles – Time permitting

Scrum Jeopardy – Coming soon

Final Scrum Activity – Building Lego City

Training Retrospective

Training retrospective is invaluable.

In the past, we have tried surveys. Their results were helpful, but not as effective as they could have been. I’m a fan of our current approach – at the end of the class, I explain the following:

“I would like for the students to provide a retrospective.”

“After spending a day with you, you will likely hesitate to provide direct feedback if I am in the room. I am going to step outside.”

“As a group, self-organize by identifying a facilitator, who will facilitate the retrospective.”

“Identify what we did well, what didn’t work, and what we can improve.”

” When you think you’ve got it, come and find me. I’ll be outside.”

“Upon my return to the class, I would like someone (usually ends up being the facilitator) to walk me through the good, the bad, and the improvements.”

Pretty straightforward, right? It is, but I have had to learn something: feedback is the best form of payment I can get. It is crucial to respect the students and value of their thoughts, I by listening without defending or rationalizing my position. I welcome their opinions and put them to use. This interaction was enlightening and incredibly constructive.

Feedback is the best form of payment I can get.

It’s human nature for us to get defensive. In the case of the Scrum training, Tana initially put a lot of time enhancing and improving my original training deck. It would have been easy to get defensive, to rationalize, and have hurt feelings. All that doesn’t matter if I didn’t learn from constructive criticism.

Consider how you might use the concept of a retrospective in your everyday work life. Maybe you can ask your peers or your direct reports to do a retrospective. Perhaps that church group you are leading or the not-for-profit where you’re working or volunteering. If you don’t ask, you won’t get feedback. If you aren’t respectful towards the input and those that provide it, you are missing a great opportunity.

To those who attended my class on Friday, thank you. It’s one of the best gifts I can get.

In the Forbes article “Why Agile Is Eating the World”, Steve Deming delivers another glossy, flowering version that Agile is mainstream and that your company is behind if Agile is not already prevalent in your organization. Now, don’t get me wrong. I am obviously pro-Agile and a huge Steve Demming fan. I have read several of Steve’s books and I take every opportunity to listen to him speak every chance I get. Steve is one of the early proponents of Agile expanding beyond software development with his book “Radical Management“.

Yet, I have to point out that this article doesn’t seem to acknowledge that the transition to Agile is often predicated by either a crisis or a fear of a crisis. In my experiences, most organizations treat an transformational organizational change similar to a plague until they are in crisis mode. Sure, they will make wave their hands saying Agile is a good thing. However, the challenges of taking on a sweeping change are often more daunting. Why screw up something that is working?

Waiting until you are in crisis puts the transformation squarely in the category of “silver bullet”. Agile and Scrum are anything but that. Both merely expose the challenges and problems of your organization that everyone has known about, but not had the courage to deal with. Planning and initiating an Agile transformation while times are good creates momentum when there is less likely to be resistance. Start small with a team or two, learn from their mistakes, and then iterate, quickly applying what you learned. The impacts to your organization will be minimal as you start scaling out. The success of your Agile teams will be your best advocate for moving forward.

This helps you take advantage of the latest info and allows you to apply any changes without hesitation.

How can you apply it to your marketing strategy now so you can keep ahead of the trends?

Learn The Lingo

There are two important terms to know with Agile Marketing: Scrum and Kanban.

Let’s break them both down to see which one works best for you.

The Scrum framework involves focusing on how much work can be completed in a fixed length of time.

It goes like this: your company has a goal that you decide to achieve in one or two weeks.

You use only what’s essential to get this done and anything else is put in the backlog to be saved for future Sprints.

You start off the Sprint by having a Sprint Planning meeting. During the meeting, the team comes to an agreement of what it is going to accomplish during the Sprint.

Every day, you have a quick meeting (Daily Scrum) with your team to discuss the highs and lows of production.

At the end of the Sprint, the team discusses what they learned to apply it to the teams’ next Sprint.

Because you are working at a sustainable pace, you immediately start the next sprint.

Scrum is the most popular framework used in Agile Marketing, but Kanban can be easier to integrate into your existing marketing plan.

Kanban involves four different components.

The key component is the requirement or user story.

Stories are what you want to accomplish that will add value to your intended audience.

Once you identify the stories you want to complete, you’re going to organize them into a “todo” column.

The columns are pretty simple. They’re just lists of where you’re at with the story.

You can organize them however you want: “to do,” by personnel, by type of story, etc.

Now, assign each column a work in progress limits.

This means is that your team can only have a set amount of work assigned to them at a time. This keeps the workflow lean and mean. The goal is for the stories to flow through the process on a continuous basis.

The last component is the hallmark of the Kanban method – continuous releases.

Once you’ve accomplished everything required for the story to be considered “complete”, you move the story to the next column to the right and move on to the next one, and so on.

As you can see, this is an effective way to keep your concept moving forward with short, efficient bursts.

Sprint Towards The Finish Line

Now that you’ve got the basics, try applying either Agile Marketing methodology to your marketing goals.

Your audience is going to have the most up to the minute info and, in turn, will give you the results you’re searching for.

Whichever method you choose, you’re going to sprint ahead of the competition.

The 5 Common Daily Scrum Mistakes You Don’t Want To Make At Your Next Stand-Up

1. This is NOT a status meeting

If you’re new to Scrum events, this is an easy (and common) mistake to make.

The Daily Scrum meeting is NOT a status meeting. So, avoid trying to solve problems by the team during the previous day’s sprint.

It’s important to keep the time limit of a daily Scrum in mind. The time is set to 15 minutes.

Respect the time of your teammates, and save the problem solving until after the meeting is over.

2. Do NOT use this as a planning meeting

Another don’t of the Daily Scrum is to use the time as a planning meeting.

Why not? Once the team goes down that road, the team members won’t get a chance to share his or her updates.

Instead, the team should stick to the purpose of the Daily Scrum, which is to inspect the progress made towards the Sprint Goal, and make any adjustments to the team’s plan to complete the work forecasted in the Sprint Backlog.

If a new requirement urgently needs to be discussed, one approach might be to arrange a 15-minute meeting just after the Daily Scrum and include the development team and product owner. Then and there you can discuss the requirement, its priority, etc.

3. Do NOT only focus on the Scrum master

There’s a misconception that Daily Scrum has to be solely facilitated by the Scrum Master.

However, the role of the Scrum Master has a responsibility to ensure that the Daily Scrum occurs.

While the Scrum Master should ensure that the Daily Scrum occurs, that does not mean he/she owns the event.

Additionally, it doesn’t mean that the team has to “report” to the Scrum Master. The Daily Scrum event is designed for the team.

4. Do NOT micromanage the team

If you are a Scrum Master, it’s important that you avoid issuing instructions to the team members. Additionally, don’t use the time to start planning how the team members should carry out a particular development activity.

Why? Because the Scrum process advocates self-management and self-organization.

Development team members should be encouraged to realize their responsibilities, working together to collaborate to solve process related issues.

To encourage self organization, the Scrum Master and Product Owner shouldn’t micro-manage the team and their activities.

5. Do NOT waste time by asking the wrong questions

For those new to the Daily Scrum, the team can start by adopting three question framework.

These questions include:

What was done the day before?

What is proposed to be done today?

Did the team face any problems or impediments?

The meeting should always try to embody the spirit of these three questions because the answers form the basis of the information that a team needs to assess their progress in the sprint.

One of the things I noticed when I started at Angie’s list was the number of people who wore Angie’s list t-shirts. It was typically the most engaged employees to boot. In fact, employees could buy a t-shirt for $5. I realized that, if I ever got a chance to run my own company, I wanted to replicate what I learned at Angie’s list.

When Tana and I originally formed beLithe, we were primarily partnering with great organizations like CEWit, Eleven Fifty, and TechPoint to work with college students . One of the things we started giving away to our students was T-shirts. Our original T-shirt from 2016 had a quote on the back was a Winston Churchill quote “To improve is to change, so to be perfect is to have changed often.”

I thought it was time to change the quote, so I found a new one (check it out here). I couldn’t write one. As I searched for ideas, I stumbled across Apple’s diversity statement off there website. I couldn’t resist. It reflects the approach that I have always felt was right for am company, but never heard anyone at my past employers be so direct. With all due respect to Apple, I used this one on our shirt.

In my Scrum training, we discuss one of the values of Scrum, openness, as one of the things that makes Scrum work. We talk about openness in terms of one’s day to day status, opinions on how work is done, and what can be improved. Diversity is generally accepted as a requirement for high performing teams. Including other points of view provides better decision making across the board. After conducting Scrum training for a number of years, I have had a revelation. In Scrum, we should be open not just in what we share, but in what we take in. We should be open to other’s ideas as well, whether we agree with them or not. We shouldn’t let all the crap that doesn’t really matter cloud our opinions about teammates.

My goal for beLithe is that we are a high performing team, and this is one small way of embracing our future. We are just starting the journey, and I hope it will be a fun ride.

We have released a new version of PocketProf, our quiz app that prepares you for your Scrum Master certification of choice. With over 120 different questions based on the Scrum Guide and Scrum.org’s Professional Scrum Master areas of study, PocketProf provides an opportunity for you to improve your knowledge of Scrum. New features include:

Added ability to enter an email.

Added the ability to choose how many questions you want to answer (10/20/30/40).

Changed the scoring methodology to display the number of correct answers in the format of # of correct answers / # of questions answered (10/12).

In a summer of uncomfortability, I’ve yet again put myself out there. This week was Xtern’s “Xterns got talent and comedy night” at this week’s family dinner. The Xtern’s were given the chance to showcase our various talents surrounded by food and fellowship. I honestly don’t have many unique talents that would show up in a talent show. So, it wasn’t likely that I was going to participate.

However, I do know how to juggle well. I talked with Al Carroll from TechPoint who said even if only for a minute or two why not just give it a shot. Chris suggested that I show up and juggle flaming chainsaws to really get the crowd into it. I’m sure a lot of the other X-terns felt the same way because only 5 people ended up signing up. I had been going back and forth about it in my head for a couple days for two reasons:

1.I might have stage fright

2.I don’t know how to juggle things that are sharp or on fire

But anyways It just so happen that I saw Fran Kay while at work on Thursday and mentioned that I was thinking about juggling. This was apparently the push I needed to finally sign up to be in the show. Even though I was last minute I knew I wouldn’t need to prepare much anyways so why not join.

When it came time to perform I surprisingly wasn’t nervous at all. I’ve always found it weird that I can play basketball or football in front of thousands no problem but a presentation would give me an uneasy stomach. The fact that I had been running training for a while has gotten me used to being in front of an audience. The training takes place in front of a small classroom type setting, not unlike the typical college classroom.

So far I have learned a lot about the business of beLithe but I also have gained personal skills that I sought to develop this summer as well. I can agree that I have become a better communicator, a more sure speaker, and even an improved writer. To sum it up I guess I would say I’ve gained a professional confidence that I might not have had before.

I even did some research on how to juggle fire so soon I’ll have another unique talent to showcase.

Happy New Year! Ok, it’s not really January 1st. At the time of this writing, it’s July 15th. Remember years ago the Christmas in July sales? For a moment, let’s consider it to be virtual New Years Day. I’ll bet you haven’t thought about January 1st as being part of a Continuous Improvement cycle and the start of the next sprint.

If it were January 1st, you would be taking some time to take a look at yourself. You’d be coming up with some resolutions that you might believe will improve your life. You would likely enter the season of exercise. The month of January is the largest part of the year for the folks who sell exercise clothes, exercise equipment, and gym memberships. Yet, we all have had, at one point in our lives, a gym membership that we didn’t use after February or a treadmill that served as a clothes rod.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any advice about getting exercise that I can offer. However, in the spirit of New Year’s Resolutions, don’t you think you should do a retro on your career? As I talk with folks any more, the conversation always revolves around how to get the next “great job” and the the lack of career opportunities that don’t seem to be out there. Yet, in these same conversations, the suggestion of increasing the odds by improving skills and knowledge is often met with the common phrase of “I’m too busy.” Too busy to invest in yourself? Really?

Changing your stars is not a concept that happens unless you are willing to make changes in yourself. Think about the impact of investing one hour per day in yourself. How much time would be invested over 3 months? At an hour per day three months, the answer is 90 hours. That’s the equivalent of over two weeks in just 13 weeks. How much knowledge can you acquire?

Sometimes, changing your stars has nothing to do with a plan, but a quest for knowledge. 8 years ago, I took a Scrum Master class that I had to pay for myself. That one class started me on a journey that has led me to Florida, back to Indy, to a couple of startup, Angie’s list, and turning a part-time opportunity into a full time gig. The ride has had some bumps, but what I ride I have had. Once I completed the class, I have been a sponge soaking up everything I can get my hands on.

I found an interesting Tony Robbins quote the other day: “In life, you need either inspiration or desperation.” For me, I prefer inspiration. Embracing a continuous improvement cycle in your life enables you to not have to get it perfect the first time.

As humans, we get wrapped up in what is immediately going on in our lives. We don’t take the time to stop, evaluate where we are, identify changes and then adapt what we are doing. I preach the continuos improvement sermon all day every day, but need checkpoints in my life to reflect, adapt, and iterate.

Take this opportunity on virtual New Years Day, reflect on what you have done so far this year, identify what you are going to change, and then adapt for the rest of this year. It’s never to late to invoke Continuous Improvement. After all, you only have five more months on that annual gym membership.

Over the course of the last few weeks, I have seen multiple teams using Scrum without consideration of whether it might be overkill. While it was readily apparent to me that Kanban or Scrumban were probably a better fit, the teams were using Scrum. I decided to put together a cheat sheet that consolidated the information into one spot for my teammates so that they could use it a reference as they go through the process of deciding. I ran it by some former colleagues and they didn’t blow it up, so I throught I would share it with others.

The title for this post, while a bit cryptic, represents what I see a lot. The saying goes something like “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” A team wants to work a different way. Somebody has heard the term SAFe. Maybe there is a newly certified Scrum Master who wants to gain some experience to improve his future job opportunities. For what ever reason, a tool or framework is chosen, but not for the right reasons. Sometimes, it’s a matter of not being aware that alternatives are available.

The cheat sheet highlights the similarities and differences between Scrum vs Kanban vs Scrumban. Again, click here to take a peek.

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